The Family Bike Trip

The Family Bike Trip – Clara Mae Watrous It was 1945, and Mama and Daddy decided on our taking a family bike trip from Jacksonville, FL, to Orlando, FL. We were too poor to own a car, though soon after the bike trip, the folks purchased one from my brother-in-law who was a used car dealer in Pennsylvania. My junior size bike and their adult bikes soon hummed down the cement block highway single file. I can’t remember if I was first or in the middle, but I do remember that 25 blocks equaled a mile. When we landed in Deland, FL, people were shouting, bells were ringing; the second world war had just ended! We stopped overnight at a bed and breakfast, where the dear old lady teasingly told us she was 38, but she was really 83. In Orlando, we visited the zoo. The beautiful doe eyed lama apparently didn’t appreciate my sweet talk and promptly spit in my face. Yuck! Needless to say, I’ve never gotten too close to lamas ever since. On the way home, a car zoomed past us, swerved across the oncoming lane and rolled over twice in an adjacent field. Miraculously, all three passengers and the driver were able to get out of the car and walk around. Right after that incident, we noticed a perfect double rainbow, symbolic of the miracle we had just seen. When almost back to Jacksonville, a pickup truck offered us a ride, but Daddy politely refused for the sake of being able to say we completed our bike trip without assistance. He must have told the local newspaper, because they printed an excerpt about our unusual family bike trip.